It’s been a while since the last blog post (9 months), so without further ado let’s start with the good news:
THE GOOD : Principal photography is done!
We started shooting “Luxembourg Mystery Tale” (LMT) on Friday, 4th July 2008 and finished the shooting on Thursday, 19th August 2010. When we started planning the project back in 2007, we decided to shoot only on weekends since we soon fathomed that it would be impossible to gather all the actors, extras and crew for 3 straight weeks, without even mentioning getting all the authorizations for the many locations we intended on shooting the movie. And even if we had managed to get everyone involved (more than 150 people) to work for 3 straight weeks on the movie, we wouldn’t have been able to finish the shooting. While our first movie “Zombie Film” was shot in only 21 days, “Luxembourg Mystery Tale” took us 47 days of shooting, over a period of something more than two years. Some very valuable lessons were learned during this time and our crew members will soon talk about them…
What impressed me most during this long period of shooting was the commitment of all the actors and crew. Even though I know that the actors and some of the crew think that it takes us much too long to release the movie, no one just quit the party and every single person involved did his (or her) job till the end. Such a professional attitude is indeed an uncommon good on an amateur production. So when will “Luxembourg Mystery Tale” finally be released? Well, that brings us to:
THE BAD : No more release dates!
In all honesty, we just don’t know when the movie will be released since we don’t know how much time the post production will take. Even though we have a rough cut of about 70% of the movie, there’s still A LOT to be done like the color-grading, the subtitles, the digital special effects, the credits, the opening animation, the sound editing, the score mixing and the final cut. Not to mention, the preparation of the marketing campaign. We have already been working on ALL of these tasks but they do take some time if they are to be done correctly. And we certainly want to make the best movie we are currently able to deliver. So even if we don’t want to announce another release date that we might not be able to meet, we promise that in the coming weeks and months we’ll see an awful lot of this :
That’s your typical editing screen (in this case Premiere Pro) and editing, adding FX and sound mixing is what we will be doing till the movie will finally be ready for a release. Or rather : that’s what we will try to do since if things go bad there’s always a way to make them go ugly :
THE UGLY : Murphy’s Law!
Just when we finished the shooting part of the movie and were finally able to concentrate all our time and efforts on the post production, our main workstation decided to have a break. When we were looking in the editing solutions, we decided to invest quite a lot of money in a Mac Pro workstation since they have the reputation of being quite reliable. Well, our Mac Pro, which we use exclusively for the editing of “Luxembourg Mystery Tale”, just decided not to start up anymore.
Right now the good folks at lineheart are looking into it and will try to save any data they can, since it seems to be a problem with one of the hard disks. Even though we have backups, this is totally uncalled for and just costs us time and nerves. I’m actually writing this blog post on my 6 years old PC (which we used for editing “Zombie Film”). We would have loved to share some pictures of the shooting here, but I simply don’t have access to them right now (not without installing the back ups).
To finish on a positive note : some major news and changes will be released soon (well, it will at least not take another 9 months before you read about it). Thanks a lot for taking the time to read this blog and see you soon.
